AT&T could not keep up with the tremendous amount of pre-orders that were coming in over the Internet and via phone orders. Customers were repeatedly getting busy phone lines and error messages from the website. Those customers who showed up at retail locations had to give up their information to employees who were using pen and paper to take data. The customer data was then entered manually into the computer system once they were back online.

Customers were also concerned when after logging into their AT&T accounts looking for upgrade eligibility information, they found they were actually logged into an account of another user. Customers had full access to other’s personal information and account information. Apple has apologized for the issues but AT&T has yet to comment or acknowledge the allegations.

Apple and AT&T have continually undergone scrutiny for a variety of problems in recent months, including the 3G networks spotty service even in large cities and last week’s hacker issue where a vulnerability was found that exposed 114,000 customer email address of Apple’s iPad users.

Customers who pre-ordered iPhones were originally scheduled for a delivery date of June 24 but are now scheduled to be arriving by July 14. Analysts predict the latest snafu will impact Apple. In fact, many believe the company will sell more iPhones because of the issue. AT&T has long been criticized for their Apple-related issues but experts feel if customers were going to revolt against the mobile carrier, they would have do so by now.

AT & T (NYSE: T)Stops Taking Early Apple (NYSE:APPL) iPhone Orders was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

The company is currently offering 1,500 peak minutes for just $39.00 a month. A year and a half ago I entered a contract with Alltel that was $39.00 a month for just 500 minutes a month! For an additional $10.00 a month, T-Mobile will provide you with 1,500 peak minutes and unlimited calling after 9:00 PM and on weekends. This deal likely won’t be around for long, so if you’re thinking about getting a new cell-phone plan, the Christmas season is definitely the time to do it.

If you want to have your free nights and weekends calling start earlier in the evening, there’s a little trick you can use to get your free hours to start as much as three hours earlier. If you live on the Pacific or Mountain time-zones and know someone on the eastern seaboard, you can register or a cell-phone plan, have the phone sent to the person who lives on the east coast. You’ll get a number for whatever locality that person is in, but your nights and weekends will be based off Eastern Standard Time. So if you live in California and your phone is an east coast phone, your nights and weekends minutes will start at 6:00 PM! The one caveat with this is that you need to make sure that you aren’t in a plan that will charge you a bundle if you’re outside your specified plan. Get a nation-wide calling plan with your cell-phone to prevent this from happening.

T-Mobile Offering Great Holiday Deals was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

We have been able to get free long distance service with our cell phones and through VoIP for some time now, but international calling has remained relatively expensive. A new company called Talkser.com is hoping to change that service. It’s a completely free ad-supported phone service which will allow you to make international calls. There’s absolutely no registration necessary, so they won’t be harvesting your personal information and selling it to advertisers.
The Talkster service is also very useful to setup conference calls. It’s completely free to do this, but the parties involved will have to listen to advertisements before the conference call begins. If the people you’re talking to don’t mind it, go ahead and take the free service if you don’t have one available through your phone system.

If the parties you are interested in talking to overseas have an internet connection, you have a lot more options to communicate with them. A new service called Oovoo is offering a tool which will allow you to have a video-phone conversation with anyone in the world. Other services like this have come out before, but Ooovoo is very intuitive to use and lets you conference with several different people at once.

About a decade ago we moved to a system a domestic where long distance calling is practically free. Instead of paying for expensive long distance plans, we just got it with our cell phones or bundled services for free. In the next decade or two, we will likely see this extend to international calling as well with the proliferation of new technologies and increased market competition.

How to Call the Pope (And Other International Numbers) For Free was created by and is property of American Consumer News.